1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the arts of database applications, information management, and report preparation, and especially to the arts of preparation and summarization of client-related information for sales and marketing organizations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Most companies, especially large corporations, have a structure of senior vice presidents who are in charge of maintaining relationships with the company's clients. Each senior vice president may be responsible for a wide variety of client accounts representing large and small companies from diverse industries.
Reporting to each senior vice-president is typically a group of account executives and administrative or executive assistants. This group, as a whole, including the senior vice-president or the manager of the group and the account executives, is often referred to as an “executive group.” Although different companies may adopt different titles for these positions, the structure and responsibilities for each position are similar from company to company in most cases.
The executive group is responsible for meeting with the company's largest or most significant clients to establish and maintain working relationships with those clients. The goal of these meetings and relationships is ultimately to sell the company's products to the clients, to inform the clients of advantages of the company's products and services, and to collect information necessary to identify potential new products and services which the clients may need or want.
In order to properly demonstrate to a client that a company's products or services fit the client's needs, the executive group must understand the financial status, commercial challenges, and competitive position of the client in the client's marketplace. Typically, this “background” information is collected during an initial meeting during which members from an executive group establish a new relationship with a new client. During a series of subsequent “follow up” meetings intended to maintain that relationship, the flow of information continues from the company to the client, and vice versa.
In preparation for these initial and follow-up meetings, the executive group staff often creates client profiles and briefing packages for the senior vice-president and account executives so that those persons will have the appropriate data and information with which to address each client's specific needs.
For example, it may be important for the executive team to understand the financial status of the client, such as recent stock price changes or recent investment announcements, in order to properly consider and prepare the presentation for the client. It may also be useful for the executive team to review the biographies of the client's executives and points of contact, and to review previous notes and action items from previous meetings. This may allow the executive team to provide consistency from one meeting to another, which may be separated in time by several weeks or even several months. An additional challenge to providing consistency and continuity in the discussions between the company and the client is that often times not all of the same attendees are present at all of the meetings. The representatives for the client, such as purchasing managers, may find it frustrating to hold a follow-up meeting with a supplier's sales staff in which new staff are present and who are not familiar with where the previous meeting and discussions concluded.
Following these meetings, there are typically issues to be addressed. These issues and “action items” may affect many groups of the company, such as the sales department, the manufacturing department, shipping, and engineering groups. Thus, the action items and issues must be disseminated within the company's organization, and must be managed or surveyed for results. In typical organizations, the executive staff members maintain these lists of action items, issues and notes from previous meetings in their personal computers, such as in their own e-mail files and word processor files. This storage scheme poses a problem when an executive team is preparing for an upcoming meeting and the individual possessing the lists is not available. If that executive team who possesses the information is not available, such as that staff member is on a trip or out of office, it may be difficult for the other team members to find and access that information on the possessor's computer. This problem is further exasperated by the fact that most executive sales team members use “laptop” portable computers, so their information repository may actually travel with them and may not be physically available to the other team members at the sales and marketing offices.
Many senior executives in the executive group have learned through years of experience that having comprehensive briefing packages to review prior to a client meeting is crucial to the success of the meetings with clients. Therefore, they often task executive assistants and account executives with preparing full and complete briefing packages prior to the actual meetings with the clients.
While this approach of delegation relieves the senior executive team member of the effort necessary to collect all of that information from the various repositories where it may be stored, it does create additional work and tasks for the executive assistants and the junior members of the executive team. Further, the team may not be able to physically access all of the information which is required, resulting in gaps or holes within the briefing package which is submitted to the senior executive member.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a system and method which provides a centralized repository for client information such that all team members of an executive group may quickly and conveniently access that information, if they are authorized to do so. Additionally, there is a need in the art for this system and method to be accessible remotely, as an executive member may travel from one client site to another client site without visiting a home office in the interim.
Further, there is a need in the art for this centralized client information repository to be able to integrate and store a plurality of forms of data, such as word processor documents, presentation documents, web based documents, electronic mail, and database records.
Additionally, there is a need in the art for this system to allow for extraction or export of partial databases to be downloaded to portable computers, and to allow for the re-integration of new information in these partial databases into the centralized database, otherwise known as “synchronization” of databases.